Tuesday, May 27, 2014

It’s
election season in California (the primary election is on 3 June), and so the
state’s newspapers are falling over each other to endorse Governor Jerry Brown
in glowing terms.In the past,
candidates could ‘cross-file’, in effort to register and win in the primaries
of both paries.In the absence of a
credible GOP challenger, and thanks to his own right-wing politics, Brown could
almost replicate the trick pulled off by the likes of Earl Warren.

The
other features of election season are the dirty tricks in play.In 2012, the morning of the election, the
story broke that the Koch Brothers were using ‘dark money’ organisations to
pour funds into supporting measures designed to strip workers of rights and
protections and defeating measures designed to provide funding to the education
sector after decades of cuts.

Today
when I checked my mail I got something called the “Independent Voter
Guide”.It came to me from an outfit
called “Voter Guide Slate Cards”, which operates out of Long Beach.Its seal looks official, bearing an outline
of our beautiful state, with blue and red colours, designed to illustrate its
“independent” nature.

It
endorses Jerry Brown for Governor, Derek Cressman for Secretary of State, Betty
Yee for Controller, John Chiang for Treasurer, Kamala Harris for Attorney
General, Tom Torlakson for Superintendent of Public Instruction, and other
local officials.

I
vote primarily for Democratic and Green candidates, avoiding the foaming,
anti-social fundamentalists who dominate the GOP as well as right-wing
Democrats like Jerry Brown who shred our safety net and public services under
the cover of promoting “fiscal responsibility”.So although I certainly don’t agree with all of their recommendations, I
would not by and large quibble with their slant.

What
I object to, however, is the impression that the mailer attempts to convey:
that it is “independent”, or that these recommendations are somehow
neutral.In reality, that is not the
case.

In
print so small it strains my eyes, the mailer notes that “Appearance is paid
for and authorized by each candidate and ballot measure designated by an
*”.It appears that Cressman, Yee, and
Karen Monroe (a candidate for County Superintendent of Schools) all paid to be
on the mailer, positioning themselves alongside popular Democrats to boost
their chances by giving the appearance that they have the endorsement of some
independent organization.

The
three of these candidates (along with Torlakson) have larger blurbs about their
accomplishments on the back page of the mailer.

The
creator of my “independent” guide is Voter Guide Slate Cards, which boasts on
its website that
it has been “Delivering Winning Results Since 1986” and lists its e-mail as jerry@voterguideslatecards.comThe website proudly announces that it is “now
taking reservations for the 2014 elections.The following guides will be published: Democratic Voter Guide;
Republican Voter Guide; Independent Voter Guide (for mixed party households and
decline to state voters)”.“For 25
years”, VGSC explains, the group “has been influencing elections through its
direct mail program”.

It’s
a big business, given that during “each major election cycle, VGSC distributes
slate cards to millions of households in California and counts among its paying
clients over 4,000 candidates and ballot measures…VGSC has proven to be
tremendously influential in local races in which advertising dollars are
limited and voter participation can be 50% less than better known top-of-the-ticket
offices….Voters statewide”, they add, being commendably open about their
dishonesty, “recognize our familiar graphic design used for 25 years”.

Our
politics are impoverished enough as it is today.Candidates from the two major parties represent
but a sliver of the options that should be available to citizens of a
democratic society.But the entry of so
much money into our political structure effectively squeezes out the views of
those who do not have the resources to purchase access to voters.

Turnout
is already very low in primary elections.And tragically, it continues to remain low even as primaries assume
greater importance: in California these elections now weed out all but the top two
candidates, ensuring that alternative viewpoints—Greens and Libertarians, for
example—are not even available as options on the November ballot.

So
it is all the more depressing to think about the number of people who will be
influenced by moneyed interests and the candidates with the power—thanks, by
and large, to moneyed interests—to buy voters’ attention.Californians should turn out to vote next
week, and they should do so having taken some time to familiarize themselves
with candidates and initiatives by consulting a variety of sources, and not
simply the dishonest mailers masquerading as disinterested guides.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Passed
three days after September 11, 2001, the Authorization for Use of Military
Force provided the President of the United States with the ability to “use all
necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or
persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or
persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against
the United States by such nations, organizations or persons”.

This
was strikingly broad language that opened the door to an endless and
ill-defined war in Afghanistan, which has since been expanded to Pakistan.In the hands of a criminal, lying Bush
administration, it opened the door to an illegal war of aggression in Iraq,
which killed over a hundred thousand people, destroyed the country’s
institutions and infrastructure, and transplanted Al Qaeda to a place where it
had hitherto not existed.

Subsequently,
this language has led to the indiscriminate use of drones to murder U.S. and
foreign citizens without due process.It
has the United States fighting shadow wars in Somalia, Yemen, and other parts
of Africa and the Middle East that our security state won’t even tell us about.It helped to lay the groundwork for torture,
abductions, rendition, and a host of other activities all associated with our
War of Terror, none of which have made our country safer in the long-term, and
most of which have visited horrific forms of barbarism on the people of other
countries.

In
other words, our representatives, almost down to an individual, thought that
just three days after an attack on the United States they possessed all of the
information they needed in order to decide that the best thing to do was to
abdicate their responsibility to safeguard the public interest and instead
grant the President the power to wage war whenever, wherever, and however he
saw fit.

There
were no questions, there were no qualifications, and there was no sense that
perhaps meeting violence with violence, and acting on emotion rather than analysis,
could be dangerous.

There
was no interest in calibrating a response to the attacks based on any
understanding of their motive.There was
no thought given as to what it might mean to launch a war unhinged from our professed
values and un-moored from the restraints characteristically placed on the use
of military violence by the state.

Twelve
days after the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., Barbara
Lee explained her vote in Congress, arguing that to vote yes would have
been to write a “blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the
Sept. 11 events—anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long
term foreign policy, economic, and national security interests, and without
time limits…..The Congress”, she maintained, “should have waited for the facts
to be presented and then acted with fuller knowledge of the consequences of our
action”.

On the day she opposed the
bill, Lee pleaded that “some of us must urge the use of restraint.Our country is in a state of mourning.Some of us must say, let’s step back for a
moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications
of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control”.She closed her brief remarks by quoting a
clergyman who had urged that “as we act, let us not become the evil that we
deplore”.

Nearly
as many U.S. citizens have died in Afghanistan as were killed on 9/11.Far more U.S. citizens were killed in Iraq
than during the 9/11 attacks, without even counting the military contractors.And well over 100,000 people have been killed
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other, un-acknowledged
fronts of the War of Terror that has brought so little in terms of security,
peace, or happiness to our country or any other part of the world.

Our
military, at the behest of bloodthirsty neocons and with the backing of our
supine representatives, has whirled through these countries with no regard for
the transformations that bombing campaigns, kidnappings, torture prisons, or
use of mercenaries will wreak on the lives of the people who we bomb, conquer,
and leave to pick up their shattered lives.

We
have deployed force with no regard for how it will contribute to terrorism that
is driven by discontent, alienation, and the economic struggles of youth around
the globe who feel that violence is their best way out.

Today,
a few members of Congress are laying the ground for the repeal of the
Authorization for Use of Military Force.Repeal would not undo any of the damage that our precipitate and
thoughtless actions unleashed on the world.It would not mark a significant shift in the outlook of the executive
branch or likely, in the conduct of our foreign policy.

But
it would suggest that we might be—over a decade on—beginning to learn from our
folly, and that we understand that writing blank checks for the use of violence
is not a moral, appropriate, or productive way of governing our relations with
our fellow global citizens.

Today,
a whole generation of children in the United States has grown up under a
government that believes that it can kill its way out of any problem, and that
the blunt instrument of the U.S. military is all that is needed to make the
U.S. safe and the world peaceful.Our
country increasingly seems committed to creating a global wilderness that it
can then call a peace.

The
Fulbright program, funded by the U.S. government as well as foreign governments
and some private sources, provides for educational exchanges.American students can go abroad on programs
of study and research, and academics and professionals can use the program for
research and teaching purposes abroad.Foreign students and researchers in turn come to the United States to
study.

The
program is a prestigious one (I applied at the end of my undergraduate studies
without success), and I’ve met many Fulbright scholars over the years who do
wonderful work across many fields.

There
have been many international efforts over the years to bring people from
different nations together in pursuit of common problems, or at least to
initiate conversations about those problems.I live at an International House, an institution representative of one
such effort.

Many
of these efforts focus on the bonds between cultural and economic elites,
operating under the assumption that if such people can understand one another,
all will be well.That we live in an age
dominated by a global plutocracy suggests some obvious faults with such a
model.

I
obviously don’t have any idea what the Obama Administration is thinking when it
suggests $30 million in cuts to a program which is so obviously beneficial in
its transmission and creation of knowledge, its contribution to global
dialogue, and its promotion of a more humane side of the U.S. than our
jingoistic foreign policy.

One
critic of the cuts pointed out not only what a small amount of money
(representing a fair-sized chunk of Fulbright’s budget) the cut is to the
federal government, and how necessary a dose of internationalism is to a
country in which “only about 1% of American college students ever study
abroad.Fewer than 20% speak more than
one language—a figure that includes immigrants for whom English comes second or
third”.

The
same critic noted that divestment from the Fulbright will be accompanied by a
shift of funding toward more militaristic and client-based programs “whose aim
is to identify and cultivate the locals we can do business with in countries
that may or may not welcome our outreach, or our handpicked young leaders
either”.

Fulbright
creates open and unconditional dialogue with no strings attached, away from the
supervision of people pushing the nationalist agendas that have wreaked no end
of havoc on the world.This dialogue
often centres on common aspirations and problems.The replacement model will likely consist of
one-way directives from Washington to those prepared to sing from its
hymnbook.

Too
often our country seems paranoid, close-minded, and incapable of understanding
the perspectives of our fellow global citizens.We are not alone, by any means, in possessing these characteristics, but
because we remain a powerful country, critical to the functioning of any
rational world order, our character and behavior matter a great deal.And so when our paranoia and close-mindedness
generates violence, uncertainty, and inequity in the world, no one stands to
gain.

The
Fulbright program is a small thing, but one that has the potential to go a long
way toward putting people in contact with each other.That the Obama administration—confronted by bloat
in a war machine that seems incapable of acting in the public or global
interest—would decide to cut a program that could not but do good, even if it
is a small good, says much about its priorities, and much about why our
international order is broken.

Africa has been in the news for much of the past
couple of weeks because of the kidnapping of a group of students in Nigeria by
Boko Haram, a militant fundamentalist group which shares with fellow religious
fundamentalists around the world dissatisfaction with many of the elements of
modern life.However, Boko Haram goes
farther than most, having embraced a campaign of terror directed at both
civilians and government personnel across the country from its base in the
north.

The group has been buoyed by historic divisions between north and south, religious and cultural divides, and the
failure of the Nigerian government to deliver on its promises to beleaguered citizens
even as the country’s wealth is sucked out of southern oilfields by
multinationals that employ private armies to protect their oceanic oil
platforms.

But if the violence that Boko Haram is unleashing on
Nigeria is partially a result of the government’s failure to tame corruption
and use a redistribution of wealth to head off fundamentalism, it also exposes
the lack of trust that Nigerian citizens have in their state.It is arguably the case that the government’s
response to Boko Haram has been hamstrung by the lack of trust in the military,
an institution with a history of meddling in the country’s politics, which have
suffered from a number of coups, as well as a cataclysmic civil war, since
independence.

The government’s response to Boko Haram’s attacks on
schools (which per its name it sees as egregious examples of “Westernisation”
and modernity) has been anemic, ineffective, or nonexistent, depending on who
you ask.International social media
campaigns and a vocal Nigerian civil society have put increasing pressure on
the government to act.

But there are reasons to beware of the action which
could result from this pressure from citizens to do something—anything—to combat the group which is
striking at the country’s youth with seeming impunity in places—schools—where they
should be safe.

Kenya was joined by Ethiopia, and received
assistance from the United States.The
firepower the two countries brought to bear was much greater than anything Al
Shabaab could muster.But even as the
formal operation wound down and the Kenyan forces were folded under the command
of an African Union mission, the weakness of their position was exposed.

Not only was the Kenyan military accused by Somalis
of abuse and atrocities, but Al Shabaab took the fight to Kenya’s cities, with
bombs and grenade attacks in cities in the north, Nairobi, and the coast.Those attacks have become increasingly
regular, and are shaking Kenya’s civil society to its core.In my visits over the past several years,
Nairobi is increasingly on edge, with ever more security measures in
place.The attack on the Westgate Mall
in an affluent neighbourhood drew international attention to a terror campaign
that had been going on for a couple of years by that point.

But it is not just Kenyans’ sense of security which
has been threatened by the impunity with which Al Shabaab seems to
operate.Their sense of community is
equally fragile.There are many Somalis
living in Kenya—some for generations—and this community has become the focus of
security efforts, which typically come in the form of massive sweeps through
Somali neighbourhoods after each bombing.

The profiling, the sweeps, and the harrowing
interrogations which follow are splitting Kenya and are at odds with the
language of unity deployed by the government.But the security measures which seem so repressive to Kenyan Somalis
stem from the demand by Kenya’s citizenry that the government take some kind of
action to reduce the sense of insecurity that Al Shabaab has created.

I would argue that the Kenyan security services are
in danger of becoming Al Shabaab’s best recruitment tool as their measures
create the very divisions that the group describes as existing in Kenyan society
as a subsidiary gripe to its promotion of fundamentalism (the organisations
name invokes “the youth”, the demographic group already most marginalized within
both Kenya and Nigeria).As the United
States has always found, meeting terror with terror can legitimate the very organization
whose goals a state power seeks to defeat.

If Nigeria follows Kenya’s lead in using massive
military force, and with targeting entire communities, it will be in danger of
facing an even more deadly threat to its abilities not only to maintain order,
but to even maintain a sense that “Nigeria” is a worthwhile civic project for
its citizens.

The United States faces its own challenges in
responding to these events in Africa.On
the one hand, the urgency of the situation in Nigeria, in which schoolchildren
effectively become hostages within their own country, seems to demand
action.On the other, a foreign military
presence, however small, could prove inflammatory and counterproductive.

The claim has been countered by others who contend
that the aims of both groups remain essentially local, and that the best way to
create a real threat to the United States, and to link the two would be to take
military action on the false-supposition that they are part of a wider
conspiracy against the United States.This
is a view to which I would hope that most people are receptive after we saw
what happened when we acted on the Bush administration’s lies equating Al Qaeda
with the Saddam Hussein regime, with the result that our own military
intervention transplanted Al Qaeda to Iraq.

The governments of both Nigeria and Kenya face an
unenviable position.Certain security
measures are clearly in order in the short term to protect their countries’
citizens.But the line between proportionate
and effective action, and action which could create a crisis of greater and
more serious proportions is one which is easy to cross, particularly when a
panicky government is being egged on by a xenophobic or irate citizenry.

The root causes of both insurgencies are social,
cultural, and economic, and the solutions will ultimately have to be of the
same character.But because any
solutions will take time both to reason out no less implement, the Kenyan and
Nigerian governments are forced to deal with questions not only of proportion,
but of time, and must balance these against one another.

My own hope is that those governments can learn from
one another’s experiences and those of other nations and resist the temptation
to meet violent force with their own indiscriminate force in a way which will
fracture their national communities.But
this will necessitate much introspection not only on the part of authorities,
but of citizens and communities in both countries.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.